Apollo, Ares, Temasek CEOs on the evolving private market playbook at Bloomberg Invest

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Traditional economic signals matter less, with geopolitics and technology now driving a larger share of market risk.  

• More frequent shocks are pushing private market firms to prioritize diversification and liquidity.  

• Future growth is seen to be shifting toward AI-linked sectors and individual investors. 

Private market leaders are pointing to a more dynamic investing backdrop — one where traditional economic indicators remain important, but investors also have to contend with geopolitics, technological disruption and market turbulence. 

“If you look at the numbers, things are great,” Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management says at Bloomberg Invest in New York.

“Everyone has a job, capital spending is off the charts and very conducive to future employment, government policy is very accommodative, capital markets are wide open. That’s normally 95% of what you need to worry about. Right now, that’s only 70% of what you need to worry about. The other 30% is geopolitics, government borrowing, excesses in capital markets, technological change.” 

Navigating the new (volatile) normal 

To Rowan’s point that drivers of volatility currently require additional consideration relative to typical economic indicators, many managers are prioritizing diversification and liquidity.  

“In a world where there are more surprises, shocks come more frequently, and with disruptions like AI, it’s important to have enough liquidity to be able to pivot where you put your chips in the longer term, or even to rebalance for the shorter term. There’s a premium in being liquid today,” says Temasek Holdings CEO Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara. 

Chief among the current catalysts of market volatility is AI disruption, particularly in the software sector. Michael Arougheti, Co-Founder and CEO of Ares Management Corporation notes that diversification is key in this environment: “If software disrupts a sector of our portfolio, then our digital infrastructure/data center development business benefits.”  

For Apollo’s investors, CEO Rowan says this AI-driven software shakeout is less of a concern for their investors as it represents such a small portion of the firm’s private equity and credit portfolios. 

“We run a broadly diversified credit book that is not concentrated in software. The problem with software is that it was 30% of the levered buyout market, therefore it was 30% of the levered lending market, and therefore it is overrepresented and subject to attack,” he explains. 

On the other hand, Sandrasegara points out that software concerns don’t necessarily apply to the entire sector: “Software that is mission-critical and accentuates your product offerings, it’s a good place to be. No matter what, we’re still going to need software.”

Where capital is flowing

The rapid proliferation of AI is a prominent investment theme for large asset managers.

“The counterbalance to AI disruption is AI adoption. Companies that can adopt AI to accentuate their business models to not just withstand the shock of disruption, but actually thrive in it, that’s the most important thing we look for,” says Sandrasegara. He cites biotech and pharma as sectors where AI solutions will have a profound positive impact. 

At Ares, “we’re making investments around secular themes – digital infrastructure and digitization, realigning of global supply chains, reindustrialization of the U.S. economy – that aren’t generally knocked off track by day-to-day changes,” says Arougheti.

He also notes that the firm is bullish on the sports sector. “From an investment outcome standpoint, it’s almost completely uncorrelated from anything else you can own in your portfolio.” 

Rowan says there are two main drivers of Apollo’s business: the need to produce retirement income, and an ongoing global industrial renaissance taking place among investment-grade companies.

“Most of the capital going into private companies is going toward financing the global industrial renaissance taking place around the world. A lesser amount of capital is going into the deal business, which is primarily being funded by investors or institutions who are making a decision to sell their equity portfolios to invest in credit, because they offer about the same rates of return,” he says.

Retail investors as a new audience 

With more individual investors gaining access to private market investments, questions inevitably arise about the level of risk that private markets pose for retail investors.

Leaders at large asset management firms like Apollo and Ares believe their firms are well-positioned to introduce individual investors to private markets – and see a significant growth opportunity in doing so.  

“No investment offers you a free lunch; every investment offers a degree of risk,” says Rowan. “You can take equity risk, you can take credit risk, you can take duration risk, you can take all sorts of risk. The question is, what’s appropriate? But if you look around the world, every place that private assets have been added to public portfolios, you’ve gotten better outcomes.” 

In addition, Arougheti notes that consolidation is driving growth in the private markets. “Unlike in public markets, size is not the enemy of performance. It’s quite the opposite, because the larger you get, the more resources you have, the more you can invest in local origination, product development, a large balance sheet, and the more relevant you are to customers and global investors,” he says.

“Size is not something we pursue as an end goal, but the larger we get, the better our performance is.” 

Insights in this article are based on discussions at the Bloomberg Invest event held in New York in March 2026.